This Hp Elitebook I Tested Is One Of The Most Versatile Work Laptops Of 2025 - And It's On Sale

ZDNET's cardinal takeaways

• The HP EliteBook Ultra G1i is connected waste for $1,949.
• I highly urge it to group looking for a laptop pinch top-performing hardware, a vibrant screen, and a high-quality webcam.
• However, because of its constricted larboard selection, immoderate mightiness find its usability constricted without supplementary accessories.

Work laptops don't person to beryllium boring hunks of grey metal. There are plentifulness of eye-catching models providing engaging experiences. People looking for these devices often gravitate toward MacBooks, and pinch bully reason. 

Also: The champion HP laptops you tin buy: Expert tested

Apple hardware is flashy and nosy to use. If you're a Windows personification and want thing similar, I propose HP's caller EliteBook Ultra G1i. This machine intends to ruin each different laptops by excelling successful aggregate areas: work, entertainment, and everything successful between.

Before I talk really good it performed, let maine to gush complete nan EliteBook's creation because HP made respective awesome decisions. The laptop sports an Atmosphere Blue overgarment job, a beautiful shadiness of acheronian blue. It boasts a featherweight design, measuring 0.46 inches erstwhile closed and weighing 2.63 pounds. 

Slim computers for illustration this are susceptible to damage, truthful HP developed it to beryllium rather sturdy. The institution claims it passed 19 subject durability tests.  

For a display, nan EliteBook Ultra houses a 14-inch 2.8K OLED touchscreen. Visual output is vibrant, covering nan full DCI-P3 colour gamut. On-screen animations are velvety soft acknowledgment to nan 120Hz refresh rate. The surface is made moreover much awesome by nan 16:10 facet ratio, making nan show look larger than it is. Everything useful together to make HP's laptop an effective content-creation machine.

Also: I tested HP's caller EliteBook X G1i, and it's a featherweight champ successful nan office

Above nan surface is simply a 9MP camera tin of signaling video calls up to 1440p resolution. Image value stays clear and pristine moreover successful rooms pinch mediocre lighting. The lens is supported by Windows Studio Effects, which, done artificial intelligence, ensures that you enactment successful nan mediate of nan shot, among different things.

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There are a fewer creation aspects that I wasn't a instrumentality of. First, I wasn't excessively keen connected nan keyboard. The keys felt alternatively mushy, lacking that satisfying tactile feedback I crave. This is offset by nan awesome trackpad. It's spacious, and done nan myHP app, you tin activate multitouch gestures, expanding its usability.

Also: I've tested dozens of ultralight laptops this year, but I support coming backmost to this one

Additionally, nan EliteBook has very fewer ports, consisting of only 3 Thunderbolt 4 inputs, a USB-A port, and a headphone jack. Granted, this is to beryllium expected connected a laptop this thin. I urge buying a laptop docking station to supplement nan deficiency of inputs. My last disapproval is that nan touchscreen is glossy, which tin make it difficult to spot nether sunny conditions.

Under nan hood, my reappraisal portion had an Intel Core Ultra 7 268V processor, an integrated Intel Arc graphics card, and 32GB of RAM. That's a coagulated hardware configuration, truthful I had to put it to nan test.

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For nan astir part, HP's instrumentality did really well. I opened astir 40 browser tabs moving GIFs, videos, audio recordings, and Amazon merchandise listings. There wasn't moreover a hint of slowdown. The array beneath compares various benchmark tests to Samsung's Galaxy Book5 Pro, different MacBook-esque laptop I've tested, and is priced similarly. As you tin spot successful nan numbers below, nan EliteBook Ultra G1i boasts faster processing and browsing speeds.

However, it isn't infallible. Performance plummeted erstwhile I attempted to tally respective YouTube livestreams successful 4K. The bottommost vents began expelling lukewarm aerial to cool nan insides. After turning nan solution down to 1080p and a little cooling period, I saw contiguous improvement. HP's EliteBook Ultra outperformed nan Galaxy Book5 Pro successful nan processing and net browsing tests but fell down Samsung's instrumentality successful nan photograph rendering exam, arsenic noted by nan Cinebench results above.

Cesar Cadenas/ZDNET

Because it houses a Lunar Lake chipset, nan Elitebook Ultra G1i has an NPU (neural processing unit). It enhances its wide capacity and makes nan laptop rather adept astatine supporting LLM (large connection models). Geekbench AI results show nan instrumentality had a apical quantized people of 34,274. Cross-referencing Geekbench's database places nan Elitebook's NPU output astatine astir nan aforesaid level arsenic an M3 MacBook Pro.

Also: Replacing my activity PC pinch this Dell laptop was 1 of my champion decisions - and it's connected sale

Battery life is different area wherever nan EliteBook Ultra excels. Under Power Efficiency mode, nan laptop ran for astir 15 hours connected a azygous charge. Numbers stayed awesome nether Best Performance, arsenic it lasted conscionable awkward of 9 hours. What's more, nan instrumentality recharges quickly, too. The artillery went from zero to 50% complaint successful astir 34 minutes.

ZDNET's buying advice

HP's EliteBook Ultra G1li is connected sale, pinch prices starting astatine $1,649. My reappraisal portion costs $2,199. I urge this exemplary to group looking for an replacement to a MacBook Pro. It offers a akin acquisition without being forced to study a caller operating system. Other options are disposable connected nan company's online store, including much affordable models sporting an Intel Core Ultra 5 226V chipset alongside 16GB of RAM.